Welcome to the World of Jean Baudrillard

CAUTION: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR

Malaclypse the Younger: O! Eris! I am filled with fear and tormented with
terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the
planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own
people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.
Goddess Eris: What is the matter with that, if it is what you want to do?
Malaclypse: But nobody wants it! Everybody Hates it!
Eris: Oh. Well, then stop.
At which moment She turned Herself into an aspirin commercial and left the
Polyfather stranded alone with his species.[1]

Jean Baudrillard is "a talisman: a symptom, a sign, a charm, and above all, a
password into the next universe," (Kroker and Levin, BC 5); if you read too much
Baudrillard "you are in danger of turning into a hyper-reader, and transforming
the text under the power of your imagination into something of the sort it
became in the hands of the Neo Geos and their apologists. At this point you
are taking Baudrillard too seriously," (Danto, 48); "Baudrillard has begun to
work equally hard at playing the Disappearing Theorist. He has progressively
and deliberately abandoned the protocols of systematic research, scrupulous
argument, thesis formulation, 'critique' -- in favor of a style of personal
jotting (and jaunting) about the world ... this travelling man is no
Mad Max. There's no sense in Baudrillard's glass bubble that anything nasty
might happen," (Morris, HR, 28-9). "The upshot of Baudrillard's analyses is to
license a kind of intellectual dandyism," (Callinicos, 147). And so, "in the
end, does Theory ... come to embrace itself as work-of-art, dire object, and
absolute commodity," (Morris, 101, 210).

Major Influences:

Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Claude Levi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Georges
Bataille,[2] Marcel Mauss,[3] Henri Lefebvre[4] (his sociology teacher); Jacques Lacan,
Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, the Frankfurt School, the Situationists,[5] the Tel Quel poststructuralists,
Marshall McLuhan,[6] and of course the
"explosion" of May 1968 ("which, in some respects, was detonated by his own
sociology students at Nanterre," Levin, CPES intro 10). But "simply to list
the 'influences' on a complex thinker like Baudrillard is itself misleading ...
'Baudrillard is against any thinker whose ideas he takes seriously,'" (Kellner,
JBMB 5-6)

Discusses the thesis of consumer society from a neo-Marxist perspective,
relying on both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Saussurean structuralism to develop
his main theme, which is that consumption has become the chief basis of the
social order. Consumer objects structure behavior through a linguistic sign
function. Advertising has taken over "the moral responsibility for all of
society and replace[d] a puritan morality with a hedonistic morality of pure
satisfaction, like a new state of nature at the heart of hypercivilization,"
(12-3). The freedoms and liberties we have in this new hypercivilization are
completely circumscribed by the commodity system: "'Free to be oneself' in fact
means: free to project one's desires onto produced goods. 'Free to enjoy life'
means: free to regress and be irrational, and thus adapt a certain social
organization of production. [This is] the ultimate in morality, since the
consumer is simultaneously reconciled with himself and with the group. He
becomes the perfect social being," (13). Buying commodities is a
preconditioned activity which takes place at the intersection of two systems:
that of the individual, which is fluid and disconnected, and that of the
relations of production, which is codified, continuous and integrated. "This
is not interaction but rather the forced integration of the system of needs
within the system of products," (14). The relationship is similar to the
Saussurean system of langue and parole : the object of
consumption is a particular articulation (parole) of a set of
expressions that preexist the commodity (langue) . But this is not a
language: "Here we have the tower of Babel: each item speaks its own idiom ...
This immense paradigm lacks a true syntax," (15); it is "a system of
classification, and not a language," (16). "Needs" as such are created by
the objects of consumption: "objects are categories of objects which
quite tyrannically induce categories of persons. They undertake the
policing of social meanings, and the significations they engender are
controlled," (16-7). Objects signify social standing, and in consumer society
they replace all other means of hierarchical societal division -- e.g. race,
gender, class. People are no longer ranked according to these obsolete
mechanisms but by the commodities they own -- a universal code of recognition
tells us that the person with the Rolex watch is higher on the hierarchy. This
does not mean liberation from exploitation; "On the contrary, it appears that
the constraint of a single referent only acts to exacerbate the desire for
discrimination ... we can observe the unfolding of an always renewed
obsession of hierarchy and distinction," (20). Consumption is a "systematic
act of the manipulation of signs" (22) that signifies social status
through difference -- buying a Rolex means not buying a Seiko. The
object itself is not consumed but rather the idea of a relation between
objects. Also, technological imperatives undermine the Marxian problematic of
revolution because change is integral to the system and its very reproduction:
"Everything is in motion, everything is changing, everything is being
transformed and yet nothing changes. Such a society, thrown into technological
progress, accomplishes all possible revolutions but these are revolutions upon
itself. Its growing productivity does not lead to any structural change."[7]

"The whole discourse on consumption, whether learned or lay, is articulated on
the mythological sequence of the fable: a man, 'endowed' with needs which
'direct' him towards objects that 'give' him satisfaction," (CS 35). This
mythos ignores the nature of consumer society in which "the manufacturers
control behavior, as well as direct and model social attitudes and needs ...
this is a total dictatorship by the sector of production," (CS 38).
Baudrillard challenges J. K. Galbraith's notion that "[n]eeds are in reality
the fruits of production" (CS 41; citing The New Industrial State),
arguing instead that "the system of needs is the product of the system of
production.... Needs are produced as a force of consumption ." In
other words, what Galbraith calls "needs" only exist in order to increase the
pace of consumption: "needs are nothing but the most advanced form of the
rational systematization of productive forces at the individual level, one
in which 'consumption' takes up the logical and necessary relay from
production," (CS 43). "The world of objects and needs would thus be a world of
general hysteria. Just as the organs and functions of a body in
hysterical conversion become a gigantic paradigm which the symptom replaces and
refers to, in consumption objects become a vast paradigm designating another
language through which something else speaks," (CS 45). Consumption is thus
both an ideology and a system of communication (as exchange), and can be seen
as "exclusive of pleasure" (CS 46). Pleasure is not the goal of
consumption but rather a rationalization for consumption. The real goal of
consumption is to prop up the system of objects: "Production and Consumption
are one and the same grand logical process in the expanded reproduction of
the productive forces and of their control. This imperative, which belongs
to the system, enters in an inverted form into mentality, ethics, and everyday
ideology, and that is its ultimate cunning: in the form of the liberation of
needs, of individual fulfillment, of pleasure, and of affluence, etc.," (CS
50). The individual consumer is essential to the reproduction of the system.

Consumption has become a kind of labor; a bricolage (Levi-Strauss) in
which the individual invests his/her private world with meaning through the
"active manipulation of signs." What is consumed "is not the object itself,
but the system of objects, 'the idea of a relation' that is actually
'no longer lived, but abolished, abstracted, consumed' by the signifying system
itself ... As we 'consume' the code, in effect, we 'reproduce' the system,"
Levin, in intro to CPES (5).

The artistic object in this system loses its status as an artistic sign, since
this is now the role of all objects. The "cynical smile" of American Pop Art
(Warhol) "is one of the obligatory signs of consumption: it no longer
indicates a humor, a critical distance .... Ultimately, in this 'cool' smile,
you can no longer distinguish between the smile of humor and that of commercial
complicity .... [I]t is not the smile of critical distance, it is the smile of
collusion," (PAC 44).

For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis: Telos,
1972, 1981) trans. Charles Levin. [CPES]

People's relation to consumption has hierarchical status value in a system of
symbolic exchange, which is a "social institution that determines
behavior before even being considered in the consciousness of the social
actors," (31). In this system, consumption determines one's social status --
"Through objects, each individual and group searches out his-her place in an
order, all the while trying to jostle this order according to a personal
trajectory," (38). In this sense there is no point in positing the existence
of an "empirical object" (63) because the object only has meaning as a
signifying relation.

Baudrillard's Four Logics of Objects (66, 123):

Use-Value

Exchange Value

Symbolic Exchange

Sign-Value

functional

economic/commercial

gift (Mauss)

consumption

practical operations

equivalence

ambivalence

difference

world

market

subject

other objects

instrument

commodity

symbol

sign

what the object does

what its worth

relation to subject

relation to other signs

fridge stores food

2 butter = 1 gun

wedding ring

fashion

The concept of need (as in the Use-Value domain above) functions
ideologically to produce a tautology in which the subject is defined by the
object and vice-versa. The legitimacy of production rests on the certainty
that people will rationalize consumption through the concept of need. "And so
it appears that this begging of the question -- this forced rationalization --
simply masks the internal finality of the order of production. To
become an end in itself, every system must dispel the question of its real
teleology," (71). "In other words, there are only needs because the system
needs them," (82).

Consumption as sign-value is both wealth and the lack of it: "The act of
consumption is never simply a purchase ... it is also an expenditure ... it is
wealth manifested, and a manifest destruction of wealth," (112). Economic
exchange value (i.e., shekels) is transformed into sign exchange value based on
"a monopoly of the code," (115).

Individual agency is irrelevant in consumer society: "The logic of exchange is
primordial. In a way, the individual is nonexistent ... a certain language ...
is prior to the individual. This language is a social form in relation to
which there can properly speaking be no individuals, since it is an exchange
structure ... Language cannot be explained by postulating an individual need
to speak.... Before such questions can even be put, there is, simply,
language -- not as an absolute, autonomous system but as a structure of
exchange contemporaneous with meaning itself, and on which is articulated the
individual intention of speech," (75).

Problems with "false consciousness," esp. as manifest in theories of fetishism:
"Marxism eliminates any real chance it has of analyzing the actual
process of ideological labor. By refusing to analyze the
structures and the mode of ideological production inherent in its own logic,
Marxism is condemned ... to expanding the reproduction of ideology, and thus of
the capitalist system itself ... The term 'fetishism' almost has a life of its
own. Instead of functioning as a metalanguage for the magical thinking of
others, it turns against those who use it, and surreptitiously exposes their
own magical thinking," (89-90). It is not the passion for objects that drives
commodity fetishism, but "the passion for the code ... This is the
fundamental articulation of the ideological process: not of the projection of
alienated consciousness into various superstructures, but in the generalization
at all levels of a structural code," (92). Thus ideology "is not a mysterious
duping of consciousness: it is a social logic that is substituted for another
(and which resolves the latter's contradictions), thus changing the very
definition of value," (118). It is the magic of the code which forms "the
keystone of domination," (119).

Ideology "appears as a sort of cultural surf frothing on the beachhead of the
economy," (144).

The tautology of unlimited semiosis excludes the real -- the signified is
legitimated on the basis of the signifier and vice versa. This circularity "is
the very secret of all metaphysical (ideological) operationality.... The 'real'
table does not exist ... if it exists, this is because it has already been
designated, abstracted and rationalized by the separation
(decoupage) which establishes it in this equivalence to itself," (155).
Signification, thus, is reification -- "All the repressive and reductive
strategies are already present in the internal logic of the sign, as well as
those of exchange value and political economy. Only total revolution,
theoretical and practical, can restore the symbolic in the demise of the sign
and of value. Even signs must burn," (163).

Mass media: must be studied in terms of form and not content; Frankfurters like
Brecht and Enzensberger who argue that media can be liberating ignore that the
mass media are ideological through and through: "ideology does not exist in
some place apart, as the discourse of the dominant class, before it is
channeled through the media ... media ideology functions at the level of
form," (169). The mass media "fabricate noncommunication" (169) because
they "are what always prevents a response, making all processes of
exchange impossible ... This is the real abstraction of the media. And
the system of social control and power is rooted in it," (170). This is not
only the ultimate means of social control; it simply is social
control; "It is useless to fantasize about state projection of police control
through TV:... TV, by virtue of its mere presence, is a social control itself.
There is no need to imagine it as a state periscope spying on everyone's
private life -- the situation as it stands is more efficient than that: it is
the certainty that people are no longer speaking to each other, that
they are definitely isolated in the face of a speech without response," (172).
Graffiti is the only subversive media because it doesn't "oppose one code to
another" but rather it "simply smashes the code," (184).

"1. Political economy: Under the cover of utility ... it institutes a coherent
logical system, a calculus of productivity in which all production is resolved
into simple elements, in which all products are equivalent in their
abstraction. This is the logic of the commodity and the system of exchange
value.

2. The political economy of the sign: Under the cover of functionality ... it
institutes a certain mode of signification in which all the surrounding signs
act as simple elements in a logical calculus and refer to each other within the
framework of the system of sign exchange value," (191).

Denotation

Connotation

functional

parasitical

objective

ideological

truth

metaphysics/morality

beautiful

ugly

signified

signifier

nucleus of meaning

"residue, superfluity, excrescence," (196)

"There is no truth of the object, and denotation is never more than the
most beautiful of connotations.... The function(ality) of forms, of objects,
becomes more incomprehensible, illegible, incalculable, every day," (196).

The idea of "production" in a Marxian sense must be submitted to a radical
critique. For Baudrillard, the critique of consumption "attains its full
scope in its extension to that other commodity, labor power," (25). Labor
power is not an essentialist notion of human potential; it is produced as a
concept by the political economy. This is a fundamental critique of Marxism in
Baudrillard's eyes: "And in this Marxism assists the cunning of capital. It
convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labor power, thus
censoring the much more radical hypothesis that they might be alienated as
labor power, as the 'inalienable' power of creating value by their labor,"
(31). The Marxist view is thus problematic because it presupposes the
capitalist view of human beings as production machines. A truly radical
perspective would abandon this ideological construction of production -- "And
in order to find a realm beyond economic value (which is in fact the only
revolutionary perspective), then the mirror of production in which all
Western metaphysics is reflected, must be broken," (47).

Marx argued that the critique of religion was completed after Feuerbach and
only the critique of political economy could "resolve the problem of religion
by bringing out the true contradictions. Today we are exactly at the same
point with respect to Marx. For us, the critique of political economy
is basically completed. The materialist dialectic has exhausted its
content in reproducing its form," (51). This new radicalism entails not the
critique of political economy but the critique of the political economy of the
sign. This revolution in political economy concerns everyone, no matter what
class (122-3). With the domination of the code (see CPES), "Marxism is
incapable of theorizing total social practice (including the most
radical form of Marxism) except to reflect it in the mirror of the mode of
production. It cannot lead to the dimensions of a revolutionary 'politics.'"
(152). Alienation is wrong: "What an absurdity it is to pretend that men are
'other,' to try to convince them that their deepest desire is to become
'themselves' again! Each man is totally there at each instant. Society is also
totally there at each instant," (166). Reduces Marxism throughout the book to
its most reductive & deterministic varieties, esp. Lenin and Althusser. It
is in this work that Baudrillard begins the slippery slope into the nihilism of
what Douglass Kellner calls "hypercriticism": "more critical than critical, and
reminiscent of the 'critical criticism' of the Young Hegelians attacked by
Marx," (JBMB 53).

Here Baudrillard moves completely out of the realm of political economy and
into his world of "radical semiurgy," total domination by the code of
sign-exchange. Marxism, semiotics, anthropolgy, and psychoanalysis are all
useless to the revolutionary critic until they are turned inside out through
the logic of reversibility and simulation. Codes thus constitute the primary
organizing principle of the social entity -- we have moved from a focus on the
"mode of production" to a focus on the "code of production," Kellner, JBMB, 61.
Ideology is dead: "Today, the entire system is fluctuating in indeterminacy,
all of reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and of simulation.
It is now a principle of simulation, and not of reality, that regulates social
life. The finalities have disappeared; we are now engendered by models. There
is no longer such a thing as ideology; there are only simulacra," (120). The
three orders of simulacra which follow are seen as a succession of historically
material stages, each separated by a revolution ("these are the true
revolutions," 121):

The Wholly Trinity of Revolutions

Counterfeit

Production

Simulation

Rennaissance

Industrial Revolution

Bauhaus

natural laws

forces/tensions

binary oppositions

metaphysics of being

metaphysics of energy/determination

metaphysics of indeterminacy/the code

tradition

avant-garde

mass culture

Shakespeare

Brecht/Jarry

Warhol

meaning is fixed

logic of equivalence

logic of ambivalence/reversibility

magic/sacrilege

revolution

catastrophe

caste

class

mass

sign = referent

sign exchanged for referent

sign exchanged for sign

religion

labor power

code

God/nature

ideology

simulacra

Each revolution is total; in the third order none of the discourses of the
second order (e.g. Marxism) are relevant. The metaphysics of the code can thus
only be challenged by death. "This is why the only strategy is
catastrophic , and not in the least bit dialectical. Things have to be
pushed to the limit, where everything is naturally inverted and collapses,"
(123). Signs alone constitute "the purest and most illegible form of
domination... It is completely absorbed, without a trace of blood, in the signs
that surround us.... A symbolic violence is everywhere inscribed in signs,
including in the signs of the revolution," (130). Benjamin and McLuhan
"grasped technique not as 'productive force' (where Marxist analysis remains
trapped) but as medium, as the form and principle of a whole new generation of
meaning. The mere fact that any object can be reproduced, as such, in an
exemplary double, is already a revolution ... Simulacra surpass history,"
(138). The logic of binarism is such that "We live in the mode of
referendum, and this is precisely because there are no more
referentials. All signs and messages ... present themselves to us in the
question/answer format. The social system of communication has evolved from a
complex syntactic structure of language to the probing of a binary signaling
system," (142).

Communication is wet and sticky, and it holistically organizes concepts
according to a structural logic: "The culture of tactile communication is in
fact burgeoning in the techno-lumino-kinetic space provided by this total,
spatio-dynamic theater. It brings with it a kind of contact Imaginary, a
sensorial mimeticism, a tactile mysticism that grafts onto the universe of
operational simulation, multistimulation, and multiresponse like an entire
system of ecological concepts," (144).

The Hyperreal: "From medium to medium, the real is volatilized,
becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through
its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the
fetishism of the lost object: no longer the object of representation, but the
ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal.... The
hyperreal ... manages to efface even this contradiction between the real and
the imaginary. Unreality no longer resides in the dream or fantasy, or in the
beyond, but in the real's hallucinatory resemblance to itself," (145).
The hyperreal is vertiginous: "the whirlgig of representation goes mad, but
with an implosive insanity which, far from being ex-centric, casts longing eyes
at the center, towards its own repetition en abime," (146).

"When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy," trans. David
James Miller, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 11:3
(1976, 1987) 57-62.

Marx critiques exchange value only by exalting use value -- "The marxist seeks
a good use of economy. Marxism is therefore only a limited petit
bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the 'good
use' of the social! Bataille, on the contrary, sweeps away all this slave
dialectic from an aristocratic point of view, that of the master struggling
with his death ... Marxism is only the disenchanted horizon of capital -- all
that precedes or follows it is more radical than it is," (60). Bataille
constructs a metaphysical rather than a political principle of economy; a
"solar economy," a "cosmogeny of expenditure," (61) based on the principle of
the unlimited gift of sunlight. "But Bataille has misread Mauss: the
unilateral gift does not exist. This is not the law of the universe ... the
sun gives nothing, it is necessary to nourish it continually with human blood
in order that it shine," (61).

A critique of the Beauborg museam. Mass production is "not massive production
or a utilization of the masses for production, but rather a production of
the mass(es)," (8). Power disappears through implosion.

"Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation," (24). "Down with theological
power, long live teleonomical power!" (34)

Power Disappears: power is arbitrary and reversible in its form. "We must say
that power seduces, but not in the vulgar sense of a complicit form of
desire on the part of those who are dominated -- this comes down to basing it
in the desire of others , which is really going overboard in taking
people for idiots -- no, power seduces by that reversibility which haunts it,
and upon which a minimal symbolic cycle is set up," (43-4). "In fact, the
revolution has already taken place. Neither the bourgeois revolution nor the
communist revolution: just the revolution," (50). Thus, it is useless to
discuss power since power "is only there to hide the fact that it no longer
exists, or rather to indicate that since the apogee of the political has been
crossed, the other side of the cycle is now starting in which power reverts
into its own simulacrum ... only the mise-en-scène of ... power
is operational. But this is the sign that the sphere of power is in the
process of contracting from a star of the first magnitude to a red dwarf, and
then to a black hole absorbing all the substance of the real and all the
surrounding energies, now transmuted at once into a single pure sign -- the
sign of the social whose density crushes us," (51).

In the Shadow of Silent Majorities or, The End of the Social and Other
Essays (NY: Semiotext(e), 1978, 1983) trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, and
Paul Patton.

The "mass" is a concept created by simulation. "The social void is scattered
with interstitial objects and crystalline clusters which spin around and
coalesce in a cerebral chiaroscuro. So is the mass, an in vacuo
aggregation of individual particles, refuse of the social and of media
impulses: an opaque nebula whose growing density absorbs all the surrounding
energy and light rays, to collapse finally under its own weight. A black hole
which engulfs the social," (3-4). "Can one ask questions about the strange
fact that, after several revolutions and a century or two of political
apprenticeship, ... there are still ... a thousand persons who stand up and
twenty million who remain 'passive' -- and not only passive, but who, in all
good faith and without even asking themselves why, frankly prefer a football
match to a human and political drama? ... power manipulates nothing, the masses
are neither mislead nor mystified. Power is only too happy to make football
bear a facile responsibility, even to take upon itself the diabolical
responsibility for stupefying the masses. This comforts in its illusion of
being power, and leads away from the much more dangerous fact that this
indifference of the masses is their true, their only practice, that there is no
other ideal of them to imagine, nothing in this to deplore, but everything to
analyze as the brute fact of a collective retaliation and of a refusal to
participate in the recommended ideals, however enlightened," (13-14). "The
only referent which still functions is that of the silent majority. All
contemporary systems function on this nebulous entity, on this floating
substance whose existence is no longer social, but statistical, and whose only
mode of appearance is that of the survey ... They don't express
themselves, they are surveyed," (19-20). "Today, everything has changed: no
longer is meaning in short supply, it is produced everywhere, in ever
increasing quantities -- it is demand which is weakening. And it is the
production of this demand for meaning which has become crucial for the
system. Without this ... power is nothing but an empty simulacrum and an
isolated effect of perspective," (27). The mass "absorbs all the social
energy, but no longer refracts it. It absorbs every sign and every meaning,
but no longer reflects them. It absorbs all messages and digests them. For
every question put to it, it sends back a tautological and circular response
... The mass is dumb like beasts, and its silence is equal to the silence of
beasts. Despite having been surveyed to death ... it says neither whether the
truth is to the left or to the right, nor whether it prefers revolution or
repression. It is without truth and without reason. It has been attributed
with every arbitrary remark. It is without conscience and without
unconscious," (28-9). "It has always been thought -- this is the very ideology
of the mass media -- that it is the media which envelop the masses. The secret
of manipulation has been sought in a frantic semiology of the mass media. But
it has been overlooked, in this naive logic of communication, that the
masses are a stronger medium than all the media, that it is the former who
envelop and absorb the latter -- or at least there is no priority of one over
the other. The mass and the media are one single process. Mass(age) is the
message," (44). The masses "know that there is no liberation, and that a
system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an
excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization. 'You want us
to consume -- OK, let's consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any
useless and absurd purpose," (46). The masses and terrorism are "the most
radical, most intense contemporary form of the denial of the whole
representative system," (52).

Lambasts Lyotard's "libidinal economy" and Deleuze & Guattari's
"micropolitics of desire" rather brutally: "But take care! Out of this private
and asocial universe, ... some would like to make a new source of revolutionary
energy (in particular in its sexual and desire version). They would like to
give it meaning and reinstate it in its very banality, as historical
negativity. Exaltation of micro-desires, small differences, unconscious
practices, anonymous marginalities. Final somersault of the intellectuals to
exalt insignificance, to promote non-sense into the order of sense. And to
transfer it back to political reason. Banality, inertia, apoliticism used to
be fascist; they are in the process of becoming revolutionary -- without
changing meaning, without ceasing to have meaning. Microrevolution of
banality, transpolitics of desire -- one more trick of the 'liberationists'.
The denial of meaning has no meaning," (40-1).

The "social" no longer exists, (65-84). Thus socialism is impossible: "The
social, if it existed with second-order simulacra, no longer even has the
opportunity to be produced with third-order ones: from the beginning it is
trapped in its own 'blown up' and desperate staging, in its own obscenity.
Signs of this hyperrealisation, signs of its reduplication and its anticipated
fulfillment are everywhere. The transparency of the social relation is
flaunted, signified, consumed everywhere. The history of the social will never
have had time to lead to revolution: it will have been outstripped by signs of
the social and of revolution. The social will never have had time to lead to
socialism, it will have been short-circuited by the hypersocial, by the
hyperreality of the social (but perhaps socialism is no more than this?)"
(85)

Information is BAD: it destroys meaning and signification (96); two reasons: 1.
"Instead of causing communication, it exhausts itself in the act of
staging the communication; instead of producing meaning, it exhausts itself in
the staging of meaning," (97-8). 2. "Behind this exacerbated staging of
communication, the mass media, with its pressure of information, carries out an
irresistable destructuration of the social," (100). "Thus information
dissolves meaning and the social into a sort of nebulous state leading ... to
total entropy. Thus the media do not bring about socialization, but just the
opposite: the implosion of the social in the masses. And this is only the
macroscopic extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic
level of the sign," (100). Impact, fascination: "Beyond meaning, there is
fascination, which results from the neutralization and implosion of meaning,"
(104)

Also, the Medium is the Medium! "there is not only an implosion of the message
in the medium; in the same moment there is the implosion of the medium itself
in the real, the implosion of the medium and the real in a sort of
nebulous hyperreality where even the definition and the distinct action of the
medium are no longer distinguishable," (101). "In short, the medium is the
message signifies not only the end of the message, but also the end of the
medium. There are no longer media in the literal sense of the term ... that is
to say, a power mediating between one reality and another, between one state of
the real and another -- neither in content nor in form," (102)

Terrorism, in its unrepresentativity, subverts power by unmasking the
unrepresentativity of power. "Its blindness is the exact replica of the
system's absolute lack of differentiation... terrorism strikes at precisely
the most characteristic product of the whole system: the anonymous and
perfectly undifferentiated individual, the term substitutable for any other,"
(55-6). "Terrorism is not violent in itself; only the spectacle it unleashes
is truly violent," (114). "There is no possible distinction between the
spectacular and the symbolic, no distinction possible between the 'crime' and
the 'repression.' It is this uncontrollable eruption of reversibility that
is the true victory of terrorism," (115-6). "The force of the terrorists
comes to them precisely from the fact that they have no logic ... Hence the
stupidity and the obscenity of all that is reported about the terrorists:
everywhere the wish to palm off meaning on them, to exterminate them with
meaning," (116-7). "[T]he stakes are not to beat power on its own ground, but
to oppose another political order of force ... [not] opposing one violence to
another, ... but to oppose to the full violence and to the full
order a clearly superior model of extermination and virulence operating through
emptiness," (119). The goal of terrorism is thus "to make the system
collapse under an excess of reality," (120).

Seduction is what separates truth from meaning in discourse. Lacanian
psychoanalysis "marks the death of psychoanalysis, just as assuredly as its
institutional trivialization," (153). Seduction always seduces in order to
perpetuate seduction; it "is always its own end," (160). "To seduce is to
weaken. To seduce is to falter.... Everything is seduction and nothing but
seduction," (162).

Unlimited semiosis ensures not only that the real isn't possible, but also that
illusion is no longer possible -- the concept of "illusion" assumes some notion
of the "real" to contradict. Simulation supercedes ideology -- "it is no
longer a question of the ideology of power, but of the scenario of
power. Ideology only corresponds to a betrayal of reality by signs; simulation
corresponds to a short-circuit of reality and to its reduplication by signs ...
it is always a false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the
simulacrum," (48).

Media: the Situationists were WRONG & McLuhan was RIGHT -- "We are no
longer in the society of the spectacle, which the situationists talked about,
nor in the specific types of alienation and repression which this implied. The
medium itself is no longer identifiable as such, and the merging of the medium
and the message (McLuhan) is the first great formula of this new age. There is
no longer any medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffuse and
diffracted in the real, and it can no longer even be said that the latter is
distorted by it," (54). Thus "we must think of the media as if they were, in
outer orbit, a sort of genetic code which controls the mutation of the real
into the hyperreal," (55). Meaning thus implodes -- "this is where
simulation begins," (57). "The role of message is no longer information,
but testing and polling, and finally control ('contra-role,' in the sense that
all your answers are already inscribed in the 'role,' on the anticipated
registers of the code)," (119). The 'real' is transformed by this process: "it
becomes an allegory of death, but it is reinforced by its very destruction; it
becomes the real for the real, fetish of the lost object -- no longer object of
representation, but ecstasy of denegation and of its own ritual extermination:
the hyperreal.... The hyperreal represents a much more advanced phase in the
sense that even this contradiction between the real and the imaginary is
effaced. The unreal is no longer that of dream or fantasy, of a beyond or a
within, it is that of a hallucinatory resemblance of the real with
itself. To exist from the crisis of representation, you have to lock the
real up in pure repetition," (142). "The very definition of the real becomes:
that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.... At
the limit of this process of reproductibility, the real is not only what can be
reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The
hyperreal," (146).

Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis don't mesh well because they are both
totalities and thus coherent only in and of themselves, but not in combination.
"Neither their 'synthesis' nor their contamination -- only their respective
extermination -- can provide a foundation for radical theory. Marxism and
psychoanalysis are going through a crisis. We must telescope and precipitate
their respective crises rather than using one to support the other. They can
still do each other a great deal of harm. We must not deprive ourselves of
this spectacle. They are only critical fields," (84).

A radical defense of structuralism against poststructuralism, although worded
as a radical defense of "fatality" (i.e. destiny) against "chance" and
"randomness." Rather than accepting the view of meaning/order as something
imposed on disorder by the discourse of rationality, Baudrillard
defends precisely the reverse; disorder is imposed upon order by the discourse
of innocence (if everything is left up to chance, we escape human
responsibility for social situations).

Impact, Nuke War: "The long work of coupling signified with signifiers, which
is the work of reason, somehow restricts and reabsorbs this fatal profusion.
The magical seduction of the world must be reduced, indeed annihilated. And it
will be when each signifier will have received its signified, when all will
have become meaning and reality. This will obviously be the end of the world,"
(279).

"The world is not dialectical -- it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium,
sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis," (7). This
book is built around the idea that the way to radicalize the world of
simulation is to "fight obscenity with its own weapons." Thus, "To the truer
than true we will oppose the falser than false," (7). This is the
"pataphysics" of systems (14, borrowing a term from Bucky Fuller). "'Only
tautological sentences are perfectly true,' says Canetti," (34). Baudrillard
seems to assume that tautology is thus a good thing. "The only revolution in
things is today no longer in their dialectical transcendence
(Aufhebung), but in their potentialization, in their elevation to the
second power, in their elevation to the nth power, whether
that of terrorism, irony, or simulation. It is no longer dialectics, but
ecstasy that is in process," (41). Additionally:

fashion -- more beautiful than beautiful
simulation -- more true than the true
pornography -- more sex than sex
seduction -- more false than the false
obscenity -- more visible than the visible
terrorism -- more violent than the violent
obesity -- more fat than the fat
catastrophe -- more eventful than the event
hypertelia -- more final than the final
hyperreality -- more real than the real

Ecstasy -- more obscene than obscene: "the commodity form is the first great
medium of the modern world. But the message that the objects deliver through
it is ... always the same: their exchange value. Thus at bottom the message
already no longer exists; it is the medium that imposes itself in its pure
circulation ... the universe of communication ... leaves far behind it those
relative analyses of the universe of the commodity. All functions abolished in
a single dimension, that of communication. That's the ecstasy of
communication. All secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension
of information. That's obscenity. The hot, sexual obscenity of former times
is succeeded by the cold and communicational, contactual and motivational
obscenity of today," (131). We "are now in a new form of schizophrenia ... The
schizo is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself, living
in the greatest confusion. He is himself obscene, the obscene prey of the
world's obscenity ... He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all
the networks of influence," (132-3).

Intellectuals are inherently negative; "Intellectual activity is a kind of
wager, a defiance. It is a bet on the real situation. An intellectual would
be nothing if he didn't lay his bets, if he didn't defy something, at least at
the level of discourse," (170). Also, "left" and "right" are meaningless
categories: "I only want to judge people on new things. The criterion
Left/Right leads us into dividing people into good and bad. I can no longer
function according to this criterion ... I am the first victim of this old
criterion ... I am taken to be a man of the Right, if not a fascist.
Perhaps in objective terms I am on the Right. But I don't give a damn ... I do
not recognize the judgement that I am a fascist," (171-2). Also, intellectuals
cannot speak for others; in fact they might be totally useless: "I wouldn't be
against envisioning a world without intellectuals as such ... it could mean a
radiant and transparent world where there is no longer any need for thoughts,
analyses, etc.," (173).

Virilio's theory of speed is combined with Baudrillard's theory of simulation
to declare the end of history and total liberation: "We are truly 'liberated,'
in all senses of the word, liberated to such an extent that we have left,
through speed ... a certain space/time, a certain horizon where the real is
possible," (34). The "vanishing point" of music is that point at which music
ceases to exist in the "ecstasy of musicality" (39) provided by hi-fi systems.
At the same point, history ceases to exist. The idea of an original disappears
with simulation, and we will never be able to detach the "original concept ...
from their model of perfection, which is at the same time their model of
simulation," (40). "[T]his defiance of history has a long history, and it
always fascinates, for, profoundly, time and history have never been accepted,"
(42).

America (NY: Verso, 1986, 1988) trans. Chris Turner.

"Caution: Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear," (1).

The American desert is "an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of
disappearance," (5). Speed is key because "Speed creates pure objects,"[8] (6). The US is "the only remaining
primitive society," (7). Driving is good: "Driving is a spectacular form
of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything obliterated," (9)

"He who eats alone is dead, but not he who drinks alone," (15). Breakdancing
is interesting, (19). Jogging is suicide, (21, 38-9). Television is still
goo, "It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply
left alone with your consternation ... Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what
it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all,
delivering its messages indifferently, indifferent to its own messages (you can
easily imagine it still functioning after humanity has disappeared)," (49-50).
Driving is good, (54-5). Money, however, is goo, (61-2). The desert is God,
(71). "Sex, beach, and mountains. Sex and beach, beach and mountains.
Mountains and sex. A few concepts. Sex and concepts. 'Just a life,'" (32).
(Get a life!)

"There are no cops in New York," (22). America needs no stinking authenticity
(76); "the US is utopia achieved," (77). Let's all celebrate now. Americans
have the proper theory/practice balance -- "not conceptualizing reality, but
realizing concepts," (84-5). Waitresses serve customers "in total
freedom, with a smile," (93). The obscenity of America is its total
liberation, "In short, the orgy," (96). Power is impotent, (107). Reagan has
no inkling of the poor, (111). "Human rights have been won everywhere. The
world is almost entirely liberated; there is nothing left to fight for,"
(112).

This book was "meant to present Jean Baudrillard's entire work for a doctoral
degree at the Sorbonne," (ed., 9). Virilio is wrong: "Speed is out!" (14).

Television is goo:[9] "the simple presence of
television transforms our habitat into a kind of archaic, closed-off cell, into
a vestige of human relations whose survival is highly questionable," (17-18).
It is obscene goo: in the heyday described by the situationists "the consumer
society was lived under the sign of alienation; it was a society of the
spectacle, and the spectacle, even if alienated, is never obscene. Obscenity
begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theater, no more
illusion, when every-thing becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in
the raw and inexorable light of of information and communication. We no
longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of
communication," (21-2). Thus alienation gives way to obscene ecstasy.
This obscenity is no longer "hot" and "sexual" but rather "cool" and
"communicational"; Baudrillard will here oppose pornography to the sensual.
Simultaneously the subject has a need to speak and nothing to say -- to affirm
his/her existence in the face of the disappearance of the subject and the
hypervisibility of the obscene object: "The need to speak, even if one has
nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the
will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning," (30); we have
sex with images and objects when subjects disappear: "our true sexual act
consists in this: in verifying to the point of giddiness the useless
objectivity of things ... There is without doubt a collective giddiness of
escape into the obscenity of a pure and empty form, characterized
simultaneously by the excessiveness of sex and its disqualification, as well as
by the excessiveness and degradation of the visible," (31-3). Antibiotics =
Nuke War: "It would not be too far-fetched to say that the extermination of
mankind begins with the extermination of germs," (38). Thought will be
replaced by a "cerebro-spinal bubble, freed of all animal and metaphysical
reflexes ... to each his own bubble; that is the law today," (39).

The following two stages are opposed throughout the book; we have moved from
the scene to the obscene:

Scene

Obscene

spectacle

ceremony

seduction

fascination

passion

ecstasy

sexuality

pornography

secrecy

hypervisibility

seductio

subductio

drama of alienation

ecstasy of communication

expression ('mimicking')

alea (games of chance)

agon (competition)

ilinx (giddiness/vertigo)

Hot

Cold

Hysteria/paranoia

Schizophrenia

violence

terror

knowledge

information

transcendence

immanence

banal vision of the fatal

fatal vision of the banal

explosion

implosion

speed (Virilio)

immobility (thru absolute mobility)

self/other

self/self

subject

object

finitude

metastasis

These oppositions form the basis of much of Baudrillard's later work, esp. FS.
Expression/agon v. alea/ilinx are the four types of games
according to Roger Caillois. Our faster culture tends towards immobility
because "all trips have already taken place," (39). Difference is no longer
the differentiation between subjects, but the differentiation between
manifestations of the same subject -- "One is alienated from oneself, from
one's multiple clones, from all these little isomorphic 'I's," (41).

Theory: "It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be
an event in the universe it describes ... Theory must operate on time at the
cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality," (99). Theory is exorcism;
it must "conquer the world and seduce it through an indifference that is at
least equal to the world's," (101).

"Art" disappears as society thrashes in reproducible "culture": "The logic of
the disappearance of art is, precisely, inversely proportional to that of the
production of culture. The 'xerox-degree' of culture in a state of absolute
proliferation corresponds to the zero-degree of art: one is the other's
vanishing point, and absolute simulation ... from this a direct line links
Baudelaire to Andy Warhol, under the sign of 'absolute merchandise,'" (173).
"But this disappearance [of art] is not negative or depressing -- no more than
merchandise is. In the mind of Baudelaire, it is an object of enthusiasm:
there is a modern enchantment of merchandise, just as there is an enchantment
in the disappearance of art. Of course, it is a matter of knowing how to
disappear. The whole disappearance of art, hence its modernity, is the art of
disappearance," (179). Art as simulacra erases history -- "Art no longer has a
link with history and continuity, but is caught in a chain reaction, that of
simulacra and simulation, which is exactly parallel and isomorphous with the
potential nuclear chain reaction. The chain reaction of Hiroshima put an end
to history. The chain reaction of simulacra put an end to art," (181).

"If I had to characterize this new state of affairs, I would call it 'after the
orgy.' The orgy is in a way the whole explosive movement of modernity, with
its various kinds of liberation -- political liberation, sexual liberation,
[etc.] If you want my opinion, today everything is liberated. The game is
over, and we collectively confront the crucial question: 'What are you doing
after the orgy?'" (182).

The solution to the mess of hyperreality is for art to create an aura of
simulation: "From now on we will live in a world without originals, as it was
for objects and images before art existed. And in the absence of originality
we may recover some of these ritual forms, but certainly they will not be the
same as those existing before the age of aesthetics. Our forms and images are
beyond aesthetics, just as our media are beyond the true and the false, and our
values are beyond good and evil. But there is always a point beyond the
vanishing point. There is always a time after the orgy. A secret
reversibility lies in all things, even when they seem to be irreversible.
Reversibility is beautiful," (189).

"Forget Baudrillard," Interview with Sylvere Lotringer, in FF (1987).

The human race has dropped out of history (68). This is not bad, its exciting:
"Not a more reassuring world, but certainly more thrilling," (71). Deleuze and
Guattari are wrong; seduction is more important than desire: "I couldn't care
less about desire. I neither want to abolish it nor to take it into
consideration. I wouldn't know where to put it anymore," (74). 3 modes of the
disappearance of subjectivity: mechanical (cloning), organic (death), and
ritual (game), (76). "All the communication theories have to be revised,
including my own, which is still too meaningful," (78). "Death is an event
that has always already taken place," (80). "Speed is the ecstatic form of
movement," (85). "Women, children, animals - we must not be afraid of
assimilations - do not just have a subject-consciousness, they have a kind of
objective ironic presentiment that the category into which they have been
placed does not exist. Which allows them at any given moment to make use of a
double strategy," (98). "It makes perfect sense to me that the great masses,
very snobbishly, delegate to the class of intellectuals, of politicians, this
business of managing, of choosing, of knowing what one wants. They are
joyously dumping all those burdensome categories that no one, deep down inside,
really wants any part of," (103). "May '68 is an event which it has been
impossible to rationalize or exploit, from which nothing has been concluded.
It remains indecipherable. It was the forerunner of nothing," (114-5).

Theory "is simply a challenge to the real. A challenge to the world to exist
... a theory can attempt to reconcile the real with theory itself ... I hold no
position on reality ... The real -- all things considered, perhaps it exists --
no, it doesn't exist -- is the insurmountable limit of theory. The real is not
an objective status of things, it is the point at which theory can do nothing.
That does not necessarily make of theory a failure. The real is actually only
a challenge to the theoretical edifice. But in my opinion theory can have no
status other than that of challenging the real. At that point, theory is no
longer theory, it is the event itself," (124-5).

Cool Memories (NY:Verso, 1987, 1990) trans. Chris Turner.

This and America are the two "best books I shall ever write. They are
done with. That is how things go," (3).

"Revolution -- including the revolution of desire -- is even less kind to those
who think it has already happened than to those who oppose it. Thus it is not
the Revolution which will turn me into a woman. That will come about by my
espousing here and now -- passionately -- the position of femininity itself.
Now for feminists this is unpardonable. For this position is more feminine,
with all the supreme femininity it implies, than that of women will ever be,"
(7). "Seduction remains the only vital intensity; sex is simply tiring, it is
merely a bonus of pleasure," (11). "Black is the derision of White. The
amazing Idi Amin who has himself carried in triumph by four British diplomats
and is received by the Pope. The amazing Emperor Bokassa eating up little
black babies, lavishing diamonds upon the Western dignitary. Nowhere has the
concept of power been ridiculed in such an Ubuesque fashion as in Africa. The
West will be hard-pressed to rid itself of this generation of simiesque and
prosaic despots born of the monstrous crossing of the jungle with the shining
values of ideology.... Fantastic! There is no hope for this continent. All
the Peace Corps will get bogged down there. The power of derision. Africa's
contempt for its own 'authenticity,'" (15). "Sometimes it seems to me that I
have never done anything but provide the semblance of ideas," (25).
"Transsexuality is not seductive, it is simply disturbing," (76). "One day, we
shall stand up and our backsides will remain attached to our seats," (146).
"Popular fame is what we should aspire to. Nothing will ever match the
distracted gaze of the woman serving in the butcher's who has seen you on
television," (198). "How nice it would be to see the sun in profile," (203).
"Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are
answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't even arise,"
(219). "Today, ... for the first time for perhaps ten or twenty years, I
realize I have nothing else to do. No projects, no constraints. Everything
that was pending has been finished, and whatever else comes from this point on
will, in a sense, be part of a supplementary existence," (231).

"Modernity is not a dialectic of history: it is the eventness, the permanent
play of the present moment, the universality of news blurbs through the media.
Modernity is not the transmutation of all values, it is the destruction of all
former values without surpassing them, it is the ambiguity of all former values
under the sign of a generalized combinatory," (71).

Lament on the "advertising generation"; "we live in a society which only wants
to be happy with itself." Also, "in terms of power we are all suffering from
AIDS, all living in a society threatened by the loss of its antibodies (its
reserves of social and political energy)."

Condemning Heidegger and Nietzsche as Nazis is silly because "One day we shall
ask ourselves if Heidegger himself really existed," (17). History has become
myth and we look for scapegoats; before such a crime as the Holocaust becomes
myth "the crime has first to be divested of its historical reality. Otherwise,
since we have been, and still are, unable to come to terms historically with
all these things -- fascism, concentration camps, extermination -- we would be
condemned to repeat them eternally as a primal scene," (17). Also: "in view of
all this, could we not just skip the rest of this century? I intend to launch a
collective petition ... calling for the 1990s to be cancelled, so that we can
pass directly from 1989 to the year 2000," (17)

"The Anorexic Ruins," trans. David Antal, in Dietmar Kampar and Christof Wulf,
eds., Looking Back on the End of the World (NY: Semiotext(e), 1989)
29-48.

Society of Shit: "We are living in a society of excrescence, meaning that which
incessantly develops without being measurable against its own objectives,"
(29). Information overload: "So many messages and signals have been produced
and transmitted that they will never find the time to acquire any meaning.
Fortunately so for us! Fortunately, we ignore 99% of all information, 99% of
the products. The tiny amount that we nevertheless absorb already subjects us
to perpetual electrocution," (30). We are already liberated and vaporized in
the same historical moment (34, 37); "there is no life anymore, but the
information and the vital functions continue ... the year 2000, in a certain
way, will not take place," (39). The silly sentimentality of yuppified peace
& human rights movements is easy "after the orgy," (43-4). Radical
pessimism might save us (45).

Works About Baudrillard

Callinicos, Alex, "The Mirror of Commodity Fetishism: Baudrillard and Late
Capitalist Culture," in Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (NY:
St. Martin's, 1990) 144-153.